Nikita Khrushchev Biography

The Soviet political leader Nikita Khrushchev was a major force in world
politics in the second half of the twentieth century. His leadership
played a key role in the 1960s during the height of the Cold War, a
four-decade standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Nikita Khrushchev.
Reproduced by permission of

AP/Wide World Photos

.

Childhood and revolution

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born in Kalinovka in southern Russia
on April 17, 1894. As a child, Khrushchev attended a religious school
where he learned to read and write. He also took a job taking care of
cattle and continued until he was in his early teens. At the age of
fifteen he became an apprentice (a student learning the trade) mechanic
in Yuzovka, a growing town in the Ukraine, where his father was working
as a miner. When his apprenticeship ended, he was employed as a machine
repairman in coal mines of the region, where he worked for nearly a
decade.

In 1918, at the age of twenty-four, Khrushchev joined the Communist
Party, a political party that believes goods and services should be
owned and distributed by the government. As a Communist, he enrolled in
the Red Army to fight in the civil war then in progress. At the time,
the Russian Revolution was storming the country. The Bolsheviks, led by
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), were Communists that overthrew the
czarist rule (rule by a czar, or king) of Russia. Communism took control
of Russia in 1917. But not all of Russia agreed with the new government
and soon civil war broke out between the Red Guards, who supported the
Bolsheviks and the Whites, who opposed the new rule.

After nearly three years of service in the civil war, Khrushchev
returned to Yuzovka and was appointed assistant manager of a mine. Soon
thereafter, he entered the Donets Industrial Institute, a
worker's school run by the Soviets, the new Communist ruling
party. There he received additional instruction in the Communist Party.
He became a political leader at school and was named the secretary of
the school's Communist Party Committee. He graduated in 1925 and
soon became a full-time party official as secretary of the
Petrovsko-Mariinsk district of Yuzovka. There, he came to know Lazar M.
Kaganovich, the secretary general of the Ukrainian Party's
Central Committee and a close associate of future Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin (1879–1953).

Khrushchev married in 1915, but his wife died during the famine (a
severe shortage of food) which resulted from the civil war. In 1924 he
remarried, this time to Nina Petrovna, a schoolteacher. The couple
eventually had two children.

Entering politics

In 1929 Khrushchev attended the Industrial Academy in Moscow for
training in industrial administration, leaving in 1931 to become
secretary of a district party committee in Moscow. Within four years he
became head of the party organization of Moscow, thus joining the
highest ranks of party officials. There he used his industrial training
as he helped to supervise the construction of the city's subway
system.

When Stalin began eliminating those he mistrusted from the Communist
Party's leadership, Khrushchev was fortunate to be one of the
trusted. In 1938, when most of the chief party leaders in the Ukraine
were gone, he was made first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party
and at the same time was named to the Politburo, the ruling body of the
Soviet Communist Party. As first secretary, he was in fact, though not
in name, the chief executive of the Ukraine. Except for a short interval
in 1947, he held on to his authority in that area until 1949.

During World War II (1939–45), where the Allies of Russia,
America, and Great Britain fought the Axis of Germany, Japan, and Italy,
Khrushchev served in the Red Army both in the Ukraine and in other
southern parts of the former Soviet Union, and advanced to the rank of
lieutenant general. He achieved all of this while still first secretary
of the Ukrainian Communist Party.

In 1949 Khrushchev was summoned to Moscow to serve in the party's
Secretariat, directed by Stalin. Then, after Stalin's death in
1953, Khrushchev was among the eight men in whose hands power became
concentrated. In the distribution of the various spheres of power, the
party was recognized as his sphere. Within a few months he became first
secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist
Party—that is, its chief official.

Gaining power

By installing his supporters in important party positions and making
some critical political alliances, Khrushchev gained power over the
seven who shared power with him and by 1955 he was clearly the foremost
political figure in the Soviet Union. Even that important status was
enhanced three years later, when he became chairman of the Council of
Ministers, succeeding Nikolai Bulganin (1895–1975). With that, he
became the most powerful man in the country—as chairman of the
Council of Ministers, he was head of the government and, as first
secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, he
was head of the party.

Instead of looking to equal Stalin by becoming a dictator, or someone
who possesses supreme power, Khrushchev encouraged the policy of
de-Stalinization, which the government had been following since 1953,
for the purpose of ending the worst practices of the Stalin
dictatorship. Although the Soviet Union under Khrushchev continued to be
a one-party totalitarian state, where one party had complete political
power, its citizens enjoyed conditions more favorable than had been
possible under Stalin. The standard of living rose, intellectual and
artistic life became somewhat more free, and the authority of the
political police was reduced. In addition, relations with the outside
world were generally improved, and the Soviet reputation began to gain
favor.

Meanwhile, the onset of the Cold War (1945–91) began to escalate
in 1960, when Khrushchev broke off talks with President
Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969) after announcing an American spy
plane had been shot down in the Soviet Union. Two years later, the
United States and Soviet Union stood at the doorstep of nuclear war
during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when America waited for
Khrushchev to withdraw Soviet-owned nuclear arms from Cuba, the
Soviet's Communist ally.

However, Khrushchev's fortunes in the Soviet Union eventually
began to take a downward turn. Some of his ambitious economic projects
failed and his handling of foreign affairs resulted in a number of
setbacks. The de-Stalinization produced unrest in the Communist ranks of
other countries. These developments caused concern among party leaders
in the Soviet Union, many of them already fearful that Khrushchev might
be planning to extend his power. In October 1964, Khrushchev was forced
into retirement by other party leaders.

As a citizen, he lived a quiet life until his death on September 11,
1971, in Moscow. Although Khrushchev's legacy is still very much
open to debate, no one can deny his attempts to de-Stalinize his nation
that led to the improvement of everyday life in the Soviet Union.

User Contributions:

he was one of the trusted that betrayed stalin and help poison stalin while he was asleep in his quarters. they changed body guards on stalin and changed doctors on him that were very inexperienced stalins original doctors were jewish doctors very smart and good at general practition. baria the secret police chief of russia was also involed in these dirty deeds to help dispose of joseph stalin to take control of the ussr at that time he and kruschev were in a power struggle for the soviet union state .stalin would humiliate thses men in drinking parties and asked them to dance for him for hours at a time they did not like these things.one of the body guards poisoned stalin while he was a sleep

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